What Different Types Of .410 Shotgun Shells Are There.

How could a pistol be modified to fire a shotgun shell?

There are three main ways: modify the ammunition, modify the chamber, modify the gun.CCI munitions has for a long time made pistol caliber cartridges that have a plastic pill type structure that holds #9 or similar size shot. Those rounds can be put into an appropriately calibered rifle or pistol and fired. A person could also load shot into a revolver cartridge, put a wad over it, and use that kind of round of modified ammunition.You could modify the chamber of a pistol to handle the longer cartridge case length of a shotgun, especially a 410 shotgun shell. This will cause other problems that need to addressed such as cylinder length, and case extraction in an automatic pistol (if you could address it).You can modify the gun. The Taurus Judge and Smith & Wesson Governor address the issue by lengthening the cylinder and frame of the guns to handle the longer 410 cartridge, while allowing for the revolvers to also handle .45 Colt cartridges. You can also modify the shotgun and turn it into a pistol. Many people have put pistol grips onto Mossberg 500 and Remington 870 shotguns and essentially made pistols out of them. The Shockwave pistols and some other guns that have become popular are also shotguns that have been legally made into pistols. It is possible. Some people like doing that.Those are some possibilities.

Is there a rifle that can shoot shotgun shells and a regular round (or a shotgun that can shoot rifle rounds)?

Yes indeed.This is the Taurus/Rossi circuit judge.It’s a revolver rifle chambered in .45 colt and .410 shotshell, manufactured by the Brazilian arms manufacturer Forjas Taurus. They also make a standard revolver called the Raging Judge that chambers the same cartridges.Additionally, one can purchase subcaliber inserts for 12 gauge shotguns that enable them to fire pistol cartridges, although they have barrel lengths similar to standard pistols and are only slightly more accurate due to the fact that the round is fired from a more stable shotgun platform. They are, of course, single-shot only, and something of a novelty.There are however, many options available for rifle/shotgun combination guns. The US Air Force used to issue a single-shot .22 hornet/.410 over/under aircrew survival rifle. The luftwaffe offered a similar concept to it’s pilots during world war 2 called the m30 luftwaffe drilling. It had two 12 gauge shotgun barrels side-by-side, over a powerful 9.3x72mmR rifle cartridge. Soviet cosmonauts were also briefly issued a combination gun in a similar combination, with two proprietary 12.5 guage shotgun barrels over a 5.45x39mm (the standard infantry rifle round for the Soviet and Russian federation armed forces since the 1970s) rifle barrel. The stock also served as a hatchet.Additionally, combination guns with as many as five distinct barrels have been common among European hunters for some time. They are often bespoke, made specifically to suit the customer’s caliber requirements and ergonomics, so they are often very expensive. Still the advantage of being able to use one gun to take small game, birds in flight, and medium to large game with a single weapon is pretty cool. There are some commercial manufacturers that make less costly combination guns, such as Baikal and my personal favorite Blaser, with their D99 drilling available in many, many calibers and configurations.

How effective is a .410 shotgun for hunting?

The thing to remember about a .410 is this: each individual pellet coming out of the shell has just as much energy as it would if it were fired from the same velocity load in 20 gauge, 12 gauge, even 10 gauge. A pellet of mass X and velocity Y has kinetic energy Z. Doesn’t matter how it got to velocity Y, or how many buddies it had next to it when it happened. Example: duck hunting, #4 steel shot, 192 pellets per ounce..410 shell = 3/8 ounce = about 72 pellets12ga shell = 1-1/4 ounce = about 240 pelletsYou can deliver an instant kill with as little as one pellet. Typically on recovered ducks I see 5 or fewer pellets that have hit the head/neck/chest. If you’re a good enough shot with a .410 to place 5 of those 72 pellets into your quarry’s vitals every time, you’re theoretically just as effective with that as with a 12 gauge. For most of us though, shooting flying targets is difficult so we opt for the gun that sends out nearly 4x that many pellets with each shot, simply to give us a better chance of making those 1 to 5 critical hits.If we enter the realm of single-projectiles, this is a whole different story. A slug from a .410 is far less effective than one from a 12 gauge. It has much less mass, frontal area, energy, and momentum. In fact, where I deer hunt it's actually illegal to use .410 slugs because of how ineffective they are.

What is the best type of ammo to use in a 410 shotgun pistol (like the Taurus Judge or S&W Governor)?

If you want to see how various loads work, from birdshot loads to buckshot, etc., check out Hickock45's test on YouTube, It looks to me like the Judge and other similar handguns in .410 are terrific self-defense guns, uh . . . only if the bad guy is less than five feet away. It's the most inaccurate handgun design out there and literally sprays pellets far and wide at reasonable self-defense encounter distances, even with large pellet buckshot or the disc loads. Rifling spins the shot so that centrifugal force makes it spread out very quickly upon exiting the barrel. That puts bystanders at too much of a risk to think this gun/ammo combination is a good idea. And, you risk your own skin when you can't hit the bad guy in a vital area with any certainty (might just make 'em mad, or madder as the case may be?). Use .45 long colt ammunition and save the shot loads for your long gun. Or, trade the toy in and buy a .44 or .357.